There are a whole lot of movies set at sun-drenched seaside villas, which is reasonable, given that seems to be a pretty great place to spend a few weeks making a movie. But the existence of so many of them may be tempering my enthusiasm for seeing yet another, as with the new adaptation of the French novel Bonjour Tristesse, also famously adapted by Otto Preminger for his 1958 film.
Teenaged Cécile and her father, Raymond, are enjoying their summer in the south of France doing a lot of nothing with Raymond’s girlfriend, Elsa. Cécile’s mother died sometime back and the girl and her father are close, although Raymond seems to take a very gentle hand when it comes to directing Cécile. Cécile is having a summer fling with a boy who lives nearby, although of course to them it’s far more serious than any fling could ever be. The movie features a lot of slow dissolves from one beautifully composed shot of someone sitting in a chair to another of someone else doing the same thing, and we hear the constant drone of cicadas and the light crash of the waves in the background of nearly every scene, which, to be fair, are two things that mostly don’t stop once they get going. There’s a warm golden glow to everything, and we get a whole lot of closeups of hands doing things, usually buttering bread or cutting up fruit.
And then an old friend of Cécile’s parents arrives and the dynamic shifts, and Cécile is confronted with the fact that life is more complicated than we think when we’re young, even if she doesn’t realize it right away. Regrettably, the filmmaking doesn’t change much, which is to say, even though Cécile’s world is different, it’s delivered to us in the same heavily controlled, measured tone and pace we’ve had the entire time, as if what we’re being told is happening is enough, and we don’t need to feel it, too. That’s not to say we needed to switch to a handheld camera and jump cuts, but some artistic acknowledgment of a change would have been welcome. More slow sunny shots on the beach are fine as far as it goes, but at some point enough is enough.
Bonjour Tristesse is in theaters May 2nd.
